A GOD WORTH KEEPING

“The problem with getting rid of God is that you get rid of God.” This, I kept thinking in the middle of a funeral service last week. Whatever the ostensible reasons in exposition, the vapor-thin varnishes of pseudo-science, or the babbles of psycho-philosophies, the motivation and the end goal for much of academia and culture in particularly the past two centuries has been to get rid of God. The triumphant twisting and then touting of the evolutionary theory has led to naturalists declaring their delight at there being no Deity. No God to worry about looking over one’s shoulder in life. No God to worry about having to face in the afterlife. No accountability now. No judgment later. Well done, naturalists. Well done, humanists. Well done, atheists. You’ve gotten rid of God. How wonderful! Or is it? The problem with getting rid of God is that you have gotten rid of God. Now, for you who have ditched God, there is no more answer to the “why” of the origin question. Nothing to give meaning and purpose for living. Nothing transcendent to give value to the dirt, the accidental conglomerate of chemicals, the collection of instincts that humanity is. No absolutes to serve as a measure of morality. No beauty, or, at least, no reason or meaning to the beauty. There is no sense in anything. Not really. Congratulations! But it gets even worse. When you’ve gotten rid of God, there also is no hope in the many hopeless conditions that inevitably come. What is, well, simply, is. There is no comfort in times of hurt and loss. No mere human can know, understand or assuage the loss of one dearly loved. The is no basis for real trust following betrayal or abandonment. There is no model or experience of true love for humans to emulate. There is nothing to insert into the interior emptiness so shaped that only God can fill it. There is nothing for the yen within. There’s nothing in our world from our world that can reach much less scratch the itches of the soul. There’s no salvation for the lostness. A cornucopia consortium of money, people, education, therapies, career success, etc., cannot erase the feeling of this lostness. There’s no footing for forgiveness. There’s only bitterness, sourness, hatred, and strife. There’s no expunging of sin or guilt or shame—only a dulling denial that rots the soul, or worse, hardens it making it calloused and cauterized. However bad it is to have gotten rid of God in life, it’s worse to have gotten rid of Him in death. With no God, there is no heaven. There is no justice. There are no rewards. There is no vindication. There are no righting wrongs. There is no redemption, reclamation, or restoration. There is no continuance of a person, only annihilation and oblivion. There is no ultimate beauty, fulfillment, or knowledge. There is no reunion with departed loved ones. There is no healing of terminal diseases. There is no wholeness for the injured, handicapped, or broken. Pop culture rejoicing over having gotten rid of God needs to know that by getting rid of God it has, well, gotten rid of God. People today, in the metaphor I used to hear often as a child, have “cut off their nose to despite their face.” If they could only see—or “smell”: Getting rid of God has been and is a detriment to each of them personally, to their families, to their culture, to their country. But getting rid of God they’ve gotten rid of God. Only, they haven’t. They may self-congratulate themselves throughout their remaining years that they have gotten rid of God, and live accordingly. But, when they each in turn die, they will come face to face with the God they had convinced themselves they’d gotten rid of. This all reminds me of a story I first read so many years ago that I may botch some of the details. It might even be apocryphal. That won’t change its point: During the space race of the 1960s, the atheistic, communist Russians were the first to put a man in orbit. As his spacecraft circled the earth, he radioed back to ground his observations from his celestial vantage point. Smirkingly, he pontificated, “You, know, they (the Western world), say there is a God. Well, here I am up in space. I’ve looked around everywhere up here, and I see no God.” A British radio announcer reported the cosmonaut’s words and followed it with, “If he would step out of that cockpit, he would see Him in a hurry.” How true. You can’t get rid of God. The technology for spacewalks had not yet been developed. Had the cosmonaut “stepped out of the cockpit,” he would have discovered in a “hurry” that he had not gotten rid of God. If only that cosmonaut would have realized that he didn’t have to step out of the cockpit to see God. God, a forgiving, saving God, was right there in the cockpit with him. One can only believe he’s gotten rid of the God that he’s gotten rid of. He hasn’t. But, because of the mercy and grace of the God he’s gotten rid of, he can come to believe in the God he thought he’d gotten rid of. That’s a God worth keeping. --Pastor Clifford Hurst